Anthropic’s new Claude Haiku 4.5 hits GPT-5-level coding at a third of the price

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5 on Wednesday, a smaller artificial intelligence (AI) model that matches coding performance from five months ago at one-third the price, intensifying competition with OpenAI and Google for business customers.

The new model costs $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens. It performs similarly to Anthropic’s Sonnet 4 from May, but runs twice as fast, according to the company’s benchmarks.

“Haiku 4.5 is a clear leap in performance and is now largely as smart as Sonnet 4 while being significantly faster and one-third of the cost,” an Anthropic spokesperson told VentureBeat.

This aggressive pricing comes as Anthropic’s annual revenue run rate approaches $7 billion this month. The company now serves more than 300,000 business customers, with enterprise products making up about 80% of revenue.

On coding tests, Haiku 4.5 scored 73.3% on SWE-bench Verified, slightly ahead of Sonnet 4’s 72.7%. The model matched or came close to OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro on multiple benchmarks.

Source: Anthropic

Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, sees the model opening new possibilities. “It punches way above its weight,” Krieger told CNBC. “Even for my own use, even though it is not as smart as Sonnet, I’ve started defaulting to it on Claude, especially in the mobile app, because it’s just much faster getting an answer.”

For software firms, small gains in speed can translate to major productivity boosts. Jeff Wang, CEO of Windsurf, said Haiku 4.5 “is blurring the lines on traditional trade-offs between speed, cost and quality. It’s a fast frontier model that keeps costs efficient and signals where this class of models is headed.”

Jon Noronha, co-founder of Gamma, reported strong test results. Haiku 4.5 “outperformed our current models on instruction-following for slide text generation, achieving 65% accuracy versus 44% from our premium tier model — that’s a game-changer for our unit economics,” he told VentureBeat.

Anthropic is making Haiku 4.5 available to all Claude.ai users at no cost. Developers can access it through the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

The company tested the model extensively for safety risks. Haiku 4.5 received an AI Safety Level 2 classification, compared to the more restrictive Level 3 for Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.1 models.

The release follows a rapid series of launches from Anthropic, with Claude Sonnet 4.5 released two weeks ago and Opus 4.1 two months earlier.

The price cuts reflect a broader trend in AI. What required expensive, cutting-edge technology five months ago now runs cheaper and faster on smaller models.